A Dreadful Deceit

The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America

In 1656, a planter in colonial Maryland tortured and killed one of his slaves, an Angolan man named Antonio who refused to work the fields. Over three centuries later, a Detroit labor organizer named Simon Owens watched as strikebreakers wielding bats and lead pipes beat his fellow autoworkers for protesting their inhumane working conditions. Antonio and Owens had nothing in common but the color of their skin and the economic injustices they battled - yet the former is what defines them in America’s consciousness. In A Dreadful Deceit, award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of these two men and four other African Americans to reveal how the concept of race has obscured the factors that truly divide and unite us. Expansive, visionary, and provocative, A Dreadful Deceit explodes the pernicious fiction that has shaped American history.

©2013 Jacqueline Jones (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

saved my life...maybe

I love this! I work 50+ hours and attend school so I have no energy or will to read. I close my eyes and listen. This helps!

informative and interesting

Good narration and filled with ideas about our society's difficulties with race and status.